All Rise...

The Charge

The innocents will be condemned.

Opening Statement

Four Italians and a Frenchman make a movie. This isn't the first line of a
dirty joke. It's Love and Anger, an anthology film with contributions by
Carlo Lizzani (Chronicle of Poor Lovers), Bernardo Bertolucci (The Dreamers), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Mamma Roma), Mario Bellocchio (Leap Into
the Void), and Jean-Luc Godard (Contempt).

Facts of the Case

Love and Anger (Amore e Rabbia) is comprised of the following five
short films:

• L'Indifferenza (Directed by Carlo Lizzani)
Tenement-dwellers in New York watch as a young woman is robbed, beaten, and
raped in the courtyard below. The sounds of a baseball game, broadcast on
television, waft down into the courtyard from the apartments above as the woman
is victimized. Meanwhile, as the thrum of the city drowns out the presence of
the homeless and destitute, a man's wife is seriously injured in a car accident.
When motorcycle police wave down a driver to help them get the woman to the
hospital, the driver reluctantly agrees to help. It turns out he's a criminal,
wanted by the police. He decides to ditch the cops, but finds he can't shirk his
moral duty to the woman.

• Agonia (Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci) A
man (Julian Beck) lies on his deathbed, and declares his desire to be left
alone. His final moments are played out in the performance of an avant-garde
theater troupe. They mime various acts of murder and exaggerated death throes,
move about in a sort of abstracted modern dance, and spew parables, non
sequiturs, and angry polemic.

• La Sequenza del Fiore di Carta (Directed by Pier
Paolo Pasolini) Black-and-white images of Nazi atrocities and the horrors
of the Vietnam war are superimposed over a carefree young man, Riccetto, romping
through the streets of Rome.

• L'Amore (Directed by Jean Luc Godard) A
couple enjoying a casual afternoon in a rooftop garden discusses some young
lovers nearby. The woman speaks in French, while the man speaks in Italian.
Later, the young lovers talk about war, revolution, exploitation, and
innocence—she in French, he in Italian.

• Discutiamo, Discutiamo (Directed by Marco
Bellocchio) A group of students at the University of Rome interrupt a
lecture with chants of "Ho Chi Min, cha-cha!" They engage in a debate
about Vietnam. Violence nearly erupts between the protesting students and those
in the class.

The Evidence

Disunity is the scourge of anthology films. The idea of a group of directors
with individual styles and preoccupations coming together to produce an omnibus
whose power is strengthened by a delicate combination of unity and diversity
sounds much better on paper than it usually is in the actual execution. Love
and Anger suffers from an association between its segments that is so loose
it often feels as though the individual filmmakers are competing for our
attention rather than working cooperatively. Originally to be called Vangelo
'70, the film was to offer segments loosely based on stories or ideas found
in the Gospels. In the end, loosely seems to have been the operative
word. The final film is organized so that each segment is more detached from the
original organizing principle than the one that preceded it. Moreover,
Manifesto '70 might have been a more apropos title because all of the
segments are more interested in the application of Marxist politics in the world
of the late '60s than they are in the New Testament.

The feature kicks off with Carlo Lizzani's L'Indifferenza, which is
the only one of the segments that strictly adheres to the original plan, riffing
on the parable of the Good Samaritan. It's the only of the short films that
presents anything approaching a traditional narrative, yet it is marred by
awkward editing that seems to want to make it more abstract than it is. The
courtyard rape of the woman and cityscape shots of haves and have-nots ought to
reinforce the thematic content of the criminal's rescue of the couple injured in
a car accident, which is the most narratively compelling thread in the film.
Instead, the criminal's story is pushed to the last half of the segment, forced
to share equal space with the far less interesting rape (less interesting
because its characters are flat and emotionally distant, though it is narrative
in form), while the shots of vagrants are used to punctuate themes and ideas
that are already far too obvious. The structural awkwardness of Lizzani's
segment is disappointing, but it's not the piece's fatal flaw.
L'Indifferenza is undone by the fact that its parallels to the Good
Samaritan are too concrete, and that its maker seems to believe he's saying
something more penetrating and complex than he actually is. Bernardo
Bertolucci's Agonia is the presumably the reason the feature has found
its way to DVD, considering NoShame released Love and Anger as part of
their "Italian Nouvelle Vague" line to coincide with their two-disc
release of Bertolucci's Partner. In any
event, Agonia is dated and pretentious. Its deathly seriousness almost
plays as parody. The piece is little more than a filmed performance of Julian
Beck and Judith Malina's avant-garde and politically-charged The Living Theater.
Though the troupe of gallivanting hippies clearly takes itself quite seriously,
their musings and chidings play like a bizarre skit from Rowan & Martin's
Laugh-In. I half expected (and hoped) a young Goldie Hawn would pop in
amidst all the dour youthful indignation to sunnily urge the gaunt, bald-pated
Beck to sock it to her.

Agonia's connection to the original Gospel conceit is tenuous, but it
does exist. Among the hippies' semi-abstract pontifications is a recitation of
the parable of the fig tree in Luke 13. One of the darkest of Christ's parables,
it deals directly with repentance, the real-world bearing of spiritual fruit,
and of judgment. Understanding the parable is key, to a certain extent, to
making sense of the troupe's ravings at the dying man played by Beck. The use of
the parable suggests a life wasted, and the content of the hippies' charges
against the dying man suggest he lacked compassion, and that he was a
politically-obtuse square (as opposed to an enlightened member of the
counterculture). When the actors eventually dress Beck's limp, frail body in
papal robes, it becomes all too obvious that their castigation has been directed
at the church in the Rome. I suppose this final revelation is supposed to be
received by us like a cold splash of water to the face, waking us from our
collective cultural sleep. Instead, it comes off as juvenile.

La Sequenza del Fiore di Carta and L'Amore—by
Bertolucci's mentor, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and one of his greatest influences,
Jean-Luc Godard, respectively—are thematically related in their
exploration of the sin of innocence in a politically-driven world. I suppose one
could read this as a refutation of Christ's command to have faith like children,
thus connecting the segments back to the feature's original Gospel conceit, but
that's a stretch. In truth, both Pasolini and Godard seem to have followed their
own muses with little regard for the feature's unity or coherence. The two
shorts take vastly different approaches to exploring their shared theme,
though—approaches in perfect keeping with each of the filmmakers'
styles.

Pasolini juxtaposes images of innocence and political turmoil, through the
use of superimposition, in order to declare his theme as directly as possible.
The simplicity of his presentation avoids the obviousness of Lizzani's piece by
stripping away narrative elements and getting to the heart of the matter by way
of pure and powerful images. Pasolini's message isn't new, yet the directness of
his declaration does have an artful elegance.

Though it shares ideas with La Sequenza del Fiore di Carta, Godard's
L'Amore couldn't be more different in its construction. The short is
self-reflexive to the extreme ("Perhaps they're the first images of a
film…maybe a J.L. Godard film," a couple says while observing young
lovers). Godard takes the opportunity to explore the state of cinema alongside
his musings on the implications of political innocence ("The cinema is
dying," says one character, to which another responds, "Cinema doesn't
exist yet."). The dual themes of cinema and political innocence unite in
Godard's assertion of the insufficiency of film as a force for political change,
its disconnectedness from truth. This intellectual dissection is
language-focused, anti-cinematic. Much of the short is comprised of a couple
sitting at a table, conversing. They speak in both Italian and French, very
often repeating each other in translation so that it becomes difficult to assess
whether their communication is substantive or merely a language
lesson—which is most important, the words they speak or the ideas those
words contain? Is there any such thing as communication, or is it all an
illusion? And in the midst of these intellectual abstractions, Godard—as
if tricking us with sleight of hand—plants a very obvious metaphor in the
young lovers, who at first engage in political conversations of their own, but
wind up nude and relaxed, as though they've regressed into the Garden of Eden.
They're innocents, free from the weighty troubles of the couple who observe
them. This might make a happy ending if Godard's politics didn't explicitly
condemn innocence. As it stands L'Amore is a Chinese fingertrap of a
film, snaring us at both ends of the innocence/self-conscious continuum and
refusing to set us free.

The final segment, Marco Bellocchio's Discutiamo, Discutiamo, is the
weakest of the lot. In the director's defense, he was brought in at the last
minute to replace Valerio Zurlini (Girl
with a Suitcase), whose piece, according to Richard T. Jameson's liner
notes, sprawled into a feature film. In his interview on Disc Two of this set,
Bellocchio talks extensively about how uncomfortable he was with his
segment—in part because he was growing disillusioned with the politics it
espoused. Set in a contentious university lecture hall, Discutiamo,
Discutiamo isn't much more than a recitation of rudimentary elements of Karl
Marx's The Communist Manifesto. On the plus side, it's more playful than
the other segments. There's a light humor in the fiery interaction between the
two groups of students, as though the actors aren't taking the proceedings all
that seriously. This vital humanity, which drives (and nearly comments
ironically on) the political rhetoric is a result of Bellocchio's use of real
students instead of professional actors. It's a foundation that saves the piece
from being insufferable, though it's still hopelessly inferior to the other
shorts.

NoShame's DVD release of Love and Anger offers a decent 2.35:1
anamorphic widescreen transfer. Colors are natural and fully-saturated, and
there are few source flaws like scratches or pock-marks. Grain levels vary
depending on the shot, but aren't unreasonable considering the age and origin of
the source. The transfer appears to be ported from a PAL master produced for a
European release, and exhibits some of the ghosting and artifacts common to
PAL-to-NTSC conversions. None of the flaws are deal breakers, though.

Audio is two-channel mono in Italian (for the most part), with optional
English subtitles provided. The track has the flat ambiance and limited dynamic
range common to Italian features. These flaws are entirely source-based.
NoShame's done a fine job with the materials available.

This two-disc Special Edition of Love and Anger offers some decent
supplements. In addition to the feature, Disc One contains a poster and stills
gallery that runs as a 20-second featurette, set to a snippet of groovy music.
It is the only extra on the first disc.

Disc Two contains Behind Love and Anger, an 80-minute
retrospective on the film. The piece is built of four segments, individual
interviews with Carlo Lizzani, Marco Bellocchio, Maurizio Ponzi (assistant
director on Pasolini's segment), and Roberto Perpignani (editor of Bertolucci's
segment). It's indexed into four chapters, and optional English subtitles are
provided. The source is video, nicely transferred at about 1.78:1, and
anamorphically enhanced for widescreen displays. The interviews provide a solid
background on the film's genesis, and loads of detail about the individual
segments discussed. What comes across best, though, is the sysophean nature of
trying to keep five filmmakers with independent visions and sensibilities on
task—hence Love and Anger's muddled mix of themes and ideas.

The insert booklet contains a brief but informative essay about the film by
critic and editor Richard T. Jameson, brief biographies and selected
filmographies for each of the directors, and historical notes on The Living
Theater.

Closing Statement

Love and Anger is a mess of an anthology film. Pier Paolo Pasolini's
and Jean-Luc Godard's are the only of the shorts that succeed artistically,
meaning over half of the feature is a bust. That said, art film aficionados and
fans of post-neorealist Italian cinema will want to give it a look…as will
Marxists, I suppose.